Hope and the future: Temporal agency and the politics of hope in late capitalism

摘要

This special issue on the Labour of Hope constitutes a most welcome milestone in the ongoing debates around hope and capitalism. To kick-off this discussion, I offer three observations on the context in which it emerges. The first observation is historical. Arguably, this collection has been written at a moment when hope has become a scarce resource for many people around the world. Not because of the recent global pandemic, but because of the current political economy, which, like the pandemic, does not appear to be on its way out any time soon. Many people, including progressive and critical academics, have observed how the long hoped-for end of the post-Cold War global reign of neoliberal capitalism has not yet materialised. It seems unlikely to end, despite humanity's many unresolved challenges, and after decades of crises there is still no clear alternative to capitalism in sight. Wherever we look, capitalism rules supreme and all hope in a non-capitalist future has thus far been disappointed. In this context, it is not surprising that the authors presume that both 'capitalism' and 'hope' are terms that readers of this journal and beyond can easily understand. And that in their various ethnographic contexts, they appear to encounter the same kind of 'hope', and the same kind of 'capitalism' without much variation. This seeming ubiquity of 'capitalist hopes' apparently confirms an unquestioned understanding of hope as a human universal, and capitalism's presumed omnipotence. However, the contributors also depict a certain ambiguity not just towards hope as the phenomenon studied here, but also towards capitalism.